Malcolm Holcombe didn’t know whether “Bits and Pieces” would be released while he was alive or whether it might happen posthumously after he received a cancer diagnosis in 2022. Upon learning such, he soon called upon his longtime musical partner, multi-instrumentalist Jared Tyler, to lay down these tracks, not knowing his eventual fate. The good news is that his treatments were successful, and Holcombe seems to have fought off the disease.
We’ve written about Holcombe a few times on these pages, yet if you are new to him, this is as good a place to start as any. Here’s how we described him in his previous release, 2021’s politically charges The Tricks of the Trade. His gruff, resonant, cigarette-burned voice is not made for commercial radio, nor are his literate, keenly observant songs, many of which have deceptively catchy hooks. Described by this writer as “a troubadour seemingly from another age” and by others as a “force of nature,” Holcombe is a singular voice and a national treasure. His vivid imagery can evoke characters right out of a Dickens novel or, closer to home, southern writers like Faulkner or Eudora Welty. Residing in the mountains of western North Carolina, Holcombe captures the downtrodden, mostly impoverished people of the region, their struggles, and their hard-earned victories, and somehow many of his observations and short vignettes are widely applicable to all of us.
Holcombe has his own unique guitar style, a hybrid of fingerpicking and strumming, taking the listener from blues-based riffs to Celtic balladry. As an aside, if you get a chance to see Holcombe live, do so. He is absolutely riveting as he gets into a focused, almost hypnotic zone while rocking back and forth in his chair. That guitar style is anything but conventional, but Tyler has the ability to anticipate Holcombe’s next moves. Like the last album, Tyler and Brian Brinkerhoff are the producers and while, on the face of it, this is the sparest album that Holcombe has recorded, Tyler plays enough instruments to be a backing band by himself – dobro, lap steel, baritone guitar, electric guitar, bass, mandola, tenor banjo, classical guitar, drums/percussion, and background vocals.
Holcombe fills these baker’s dozen of songs with the kind of lyrics that only he could write. His close friends call them “Malcolmisms.” He often remains abstract enough that we’re not quite sure what’s on his mind. The dark opening title track has this verse for example – “don’t member your name/your face is missin’/sounds of the shadows/ your next of kin.” At times, his melodies can be anthemic as in the standout “Fill Those Shoes” which probably has the best chance of airplay of any here with its indelible chorus “I seen lives torn apart/I been there still comin’ to/Now I believe you’re the only one/to fill those worn out shoes.” Sometimes it’s just one key phrase that enlivens the whole song such as “time travels a dirt road (back) to hard luck city” or it can be an existential thought that can make a listener sit up and reflect such as the “The Wind Doesn’t Know You.”
This is not nearly as politically overt as his previous effort, yet he cries out harder for a better morality in these times in another standout, “Conscience of Man” – “I will not hide from the words of justice/I will not join the cries of liars/I will not keep my heart form climbing from the dust I swallowed behind…” There’s the kind of wisdom that could only come a grizzled mountain sage in “Happy Wonderland” “you gotta butter your bread on the right side/don’t whistle at the women ‘round here/that corn fed bible belt mama’s/gotta skillet made for your head.” And there’s the mythological, Dylan-like imagery that imbues “Bring to Fly – “the hypocrites of poisoned concrete/grow taller in their clay feet/the one room shacks of my childhood/now just mem’ries of the wildwood.”
We should all be grateful that our national treasure is still with us. We need Malcolm Holcombe more than ever these days.
